47 Laboratory
Company Profile
The 47 Laboratory company was founded in 1992 by Junji Kimura (Japanese family names are prefixed, hence Kimura Junji). Amplifiers, CD drives and DA converters, loudspeakers and cables, as well as turntables, phono amplifiers and cartridges and arms are now designed and manufactured or distributed under the brand.
The choice of the company name can be described as rather unusual (according to FaQ on the homepage):
What does "47" mean?
The last name of the founder is Kimura. "Ki" means yellow, "Mura" (in Murasaki) means violet or purple in Japanese. As a color code on electrical resistors, yellow has the number 4 and purple has the number 7, so 47 stands for Kimura.